Dems keep 'don't ask' on wish list

Senate Democrats on Thursday moved one step closer to repealing the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, with Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) scheduling a key vote Saturday on a bill to end the ban on openly gay service members.

But Democrats are bracing for an enormous backlash from repeal advocates if they fall short again.

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As time runs out on the 111th Congress, top Democrats are pointing fingers at Republicans for stalling Senate action, saying if the buzzer sounds before Congress ends the policy, the GOP will be to blame. Still, there are at least four Republican senators on the record saying they’ll vote to repeal “don’t ask” under the right procedural circumstances.

Democrats also are reminding gay-rights activists that they — not their Republican counterparts — have been fighting to overturn the 17-year “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

One Republican senator suggested “he was going to do everything he could to run out the clock,” Reid, a Nevada Democrat, told reporters. “I don’t think that’s really what the American people want — to run out the clock. I think what they want is for us to get things accomplished.”

But Texas Sen. John Cornyn, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, contends the GOP just wants an opportunity to debate and offer amendments to important bills like the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the DREAM Act and the repeal bill.

Cornyn said there was plenty of time earlier this year to tackle those issues. The Senate has been in session only 151 days this year, compared with 191 days last year, and it didn’t hold votes on any Fridays.

“Here we are in the eleventh hour, and they try to jam all this through. It’s really a product of mismanagement of the calendar,” Cornyn told POLITICO. “They used to call this the greatest deliberative body on earth. Now, it resembles more of a railroad — just ram it on through.

“They may be just trying to show their base that, yeah, they really tried hard,” he added, “and the mean ol’ Republicans stopped them from getting it done.”

Whether the Democrats’ approach will work is an open question. While gay rights groups do blame the GOP, which has promised to block all legislation until the government is funded and Bush-era tax cuts are extended, they have been urging Senate Democratic leadership to make the measure a higher priority and not wait until the end-of-the-session logjam to move it forward.

“We’re running out of time to get a lot of things done around here,” said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee and a proponent of the repeal. “I hope we can get a lot of things done, including that one.”